crackled with electrons, emitting a ghostly greenish glow. Slimy mud dragons with red LED eyes were scaling the walls of the castle around him, jagged daggers held in their teeth. Desperately, he looked around for Dodge for help; there were just too many of them. But he was on his own.
The first of the creatures was almost upon him, the dagger in its strange, doglike jaws.
Sam prepared for battle as the creature opened its mouth, dropping the dagger, and began to bark.
It was a dog, not a dragon; why had he not realized that before? He raised his sword and swung at the creature, which dissolved in a cloud of digital particles.
The barking persisted, though, and the castle was gone, along with the armor and the mud creatures.
The glowing clock on the nightstand said 2:53 a.m.
And the phone was woofing at him again.
15 | PEACH BOTTOM
Dodge said, “Sorry, mate, but you’re out of bed right now. One of our sniffers has picked up a nasty smell on the Net, over by the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. There’s been a fifteen percent rise in data-packet transfer over the last two hours. We’re going in quiet. Just monitor the activity and decode it, see what’s moving around.” He hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
A guard in a dark suit and curly earpiece was waiting for him by the elevators. He recognized the man, Special Agent Tyler, he recalled, with the gelled-back hairdo and mirrored glasses. The man who had arrested him.
The glasses were missing, but the hair was still the same.
It was the same routine with the gray van: up the ramp, across the road, and down the ramp on the other side, which still seemed a bit silly, but it was not up to him to argue with their procedures.
Dodge was already seated when Sam entered the control room. He just glanced up as Sam slid into the chair beside him.
“Nothing yet,” he said. “Firewall is wound up tighter than a two-bob watch. All the data traffic looks legit, but that don’t explain a sudden increase at this time o’ the morning.”
“I thought all nuke plants were air-gapped,” Sam said. “Not just firewalled.”
“That’s right. This ain’t coming from the control software. That’s a self-contained system. It’s from the general admin offices. Jump in behind me and see what you make of it.”
Sam picked up the location from his left screen and shot out a probe. As he did that, he scanned the central CDD database for information on Peach Bottom and added in a Google search for good measure.
“It’s an older plant,” he said. “Two BWR units, whatever they are.”
“Boiling water reactors,” Dodge said, not taking his eyes off the screen. “Most of the modern ones are pressurized water reactors, PWRs. Don’t matter. What we want to know is what data is leaking outta that site and who’s picking it up.”
“It’s an inside job,” Sam said after a few moments.
“Too early to tell,” Dodge said. “Could just as easily be an outside hack. There are some old Windows servers on the LAN, so I’m thinking it might be a null session hack.”
“No,” Sam said, more firmly than he felt. “It’s an inside job. I already checked the registry on the old servers, and they’re set to restrict anonymous access.”
“Still don’t mean an inside job,” Dodge said thoughtfully.
“The data packets are mimicking backup activity,” Sam said. “But it’s running under a user account, not a machine account, which is suspicious, isn’t it? I checked the firewall, and it blocks remote log-ins, so it has to be a direct log-in on that computer itself. Someone inside the plant is doing this.”
A low voice came from behind them. “What’s going on, Dodge?”
It was Jaggard. He was in jeans and an old Spartans sweatshirt and looked as though he had just got out of bed.
“Rogue trader,” Dodge said. “Looks like it, anyway.”
“An inside job?”
Dodge nodded and gestured at Sam. “Newbie over here picked it up right away. ’Course, I would’ve picked it up myself if I’d been proper awake.”
He winked and Sam felt a glow of pride.
“What data are they taking?”
“Dunno yet. There’s nothing new about the technology there—it’s just old BWR stuff. Nothing of use to any foreign power.”
“Could they use the information to compromise the plant? Cause a meltdown?”
“Well, it would help. But so would Google.”
“Okay, where’s the data going?”
“A public server in a small farm in Cleveland. I boxed it off the moment I traced it. Surrounded it with fishhooks. Anybody goes in there to retrieve the data and I’ll reel ’em in like a bluefin tuna.”
Jaggard turned to Sam. “Good work, Sam. First day on the job.”
“Second,” Sam said, pointing to his watch.
Jaggard smiled briefly. “Stay on it. I want to know who wants that info and why.”
“We’re on it,” Dodge said.
“Why don’t we scramble the data?” Sam suggested. “In case they manage to retrieve it. In case we’ve missed something important that we don’t want loose in the world.”
“What are you suggesting?” Jaggard asked.
“Let me crack the files,” Sam said. “Change a few pluses to minuses. A few ‘dos’ to ‘don’ts.’ Switch some diagrams around. Randomize it. Whatever. Just enough to make the data worthless if it does slip out, and destroy any ciphers that could be embedded in the text.”
“Can you do it without them knowing?” Jaggard asked.
“The kid can fart rainbows,” Dodge said, giving Sam a grin.
“Then do it. Don’t get spotted or you’ll scare them off.” Jaggard paused for a moment, thinking. “And get me the name of the insider.”
“No problem,” Dodge said. “I’ll access the security camera footage for the plant.”
“Do it. I’ll alert Tactical. We’ll hold off as long as possible to try to reel in the receivers, but I don’t want him out there any longer than necessary.”
“Tactical?” Sam asked when Jaggard disappeared.
“Tactical Response Team,” Dodge said. “The guys with the dark suits and the big guns.”
The main door to the control center opened, and in walked the strange woman he had seen the previous day in the corridor. She crabbed sideways across the room, muttering to herself. As she passed Sam’s desk, she suddenly turned her head as if she had detected his thoughts and knew he was looking at her. She caught his eyes with that piercing gaze that made Sam feel as though the contents of his brain’s hard disk had just been scanned and analyzed. She didn’t stop but disappeared into the octagonal office in the center.
Dodge saw Sam looking.
“Swamp Witch,” he said.
• • •
Tactical was deployed at 5:45 that morning and reached Peach Bottom just before noon. They set up a perimeter around an old clapboard house on the main street of Delta, a small borough just west of the plant site and home to many of the workers.
It was the residence of Harrison Ellis, an inspector in the Health and Safety office of the plant.
“Wanna watch?” Dodge asked at about twelve-fifteen.
The scrambled data package had been picked up from the Cleveland server about three hours earlier, and they were busy tracing the recipient.
“We can watch?” Sam asked, surprised.
“Let’s see what we got.” Dodge worked at his keyboard for a moment. “Satellite footage, of course, but
